Killing of doctors, vaccinators outrageous, says UN

International concern on last week’s killing of health workers and foreign doctors by suspected terrorists in the North is deepening.

The United Nations Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon, is worried that such attacks, which he described as outrageous, limit the vulnerability to having essential health service.

The UN leader condemned the killings in a New York statement issued late on Monday afternoon, just as western newswires and US television stations have started reporting the arrest of three Nigerian journalists in connection to the terrorists killing in Kano of the nine health workers said to be women.

Polio vaccination was controversial in some northern states years ago, necessitating the deployment of the then UN Special Envoy, Prof Ibrahim Gambari, to visit traditional and political leaders in those states to reassure them that the vaccination is in the best interest of the people and not a means of sterilising women.

Since Monday evening up till yesterday morning, Reuters Newswire, Fox and ABC television networks have been reporting that the three journalists arrested had spoken on WAZOBIA FM days before the Kano attack, and their speech is being considered as an incitement that provoked the killings. The journalists reportedly spoke against the vaccination, saying it was a western ploy to sterilise northern women.

In his statement, the UN Secretary-General “strongly condemns the killings of three doctors from the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, in north-eastern Nigeria, and of the health workers days earlier.”